Helen Alvaré has delivered a powerful address at the Sixth World Meeting of Families about the pro-life witness of the human family.

“How are we to do what we have been asked of us regarding fostering respect for life, within our own circles of influence?” Alvaré asks in her address. “And — for those with a vocation to go out to the world — how are we to approach the institutions wielding worldly power, with the argument, with the demand to respect all human life?”

Alvaré, the former director of planning and information for the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, is now a law professor at George Mason University.

Here is how Alvaré answers her own questions at the conclusion of her address, “The Family and the Values of Human Life”:

“Recently, though, I have wondered if there is perhaps no one messages or set of messages guaranteed to open up people’s eyes of people to the entire panoply of causes on behalf of human life,” Alvaré writes. “Perhaps, instead of a message, there is a place. Perhaps there is a group of people, and a way of life, that can do this better than any message. I am suggesting, in other words, that perhaps the family — the family which cares automatically for both the sanctity of human life, and its dignity — can and will mediate respect for human life at all times and in all conditions better than any verbal formula. In the family we practice loving the human person in his or her entirety — their body, their soul, their gifts, their promise, their hopes — and we love persons from the first moment of their existence to their last. We do not say we want our spouse or our children or our mother to have life but not dignity, or dignity but not life.

“Perhaps, it is living in this reality which is the key to helping people understand what other people’s children, what all God’s children, must mean to us. . .and to God. I can never forget bringing my first child home from the hospital when she was one day old. A tiny, wrinkled creature in a car seat that seemed giant in comparison to her fragile body. I guarded her little head against every movement of the car. It came to me in a flash during this short ride home: this how every mother, every parent feels, how every mother in history has probably felt, in every place in the world. As my children grow closer to the age of my grown students, I have now begun to see in my students’ faces, the traces of the small boys and girls they were. It is all I can do not to address these hard-working, seemingly self-sufficient, smart graduate students, as if they were my own children. And I have considered the possibility that this is just another lesson in the school of love that is the family.

“To conclude then. Several weeks ago, a doctor I had just met asked me about the nature of my work. I told him the subjects about which I taught and wrote: ‘marriage, family, children,’ I offered. ‘Very controversial stuff,’ he replied. Internally, I mourned at this instinctive characterization. I mourned that the beautiful realities that are romance and marriage and children and human love, could be seen more in the light of controversy than as gift, mystery, joy. I mourned that God had given us our spouses and children, and the institution of marriage, as crucial parts of His plan for our happiness, only to watch as many tried to turn their meaning upside-down. But then, of course, I remembered, as I urge you to remember, that we do not alter God’s plans.

“Marriage and the gift of children remain among the greatest blessings God has given us. Human beings in history will always glimpse God’s face in such love. The unique constellation of total union, commitment, fidelity, and openness to new life that is marriage, will continue to offer the safest haven for the children God entrusts us. Like our Mother Mary, our human exemplar, we must heed God’s words, ‘Do not be afraid’ as we recommit ourselves to God’s causes in marriage, motherhood and fatherhood.”

— Tom McFeely